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Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous
It is bragging in the same sense that the Confederate flag as the state flag of three southern states is bragging. The DeathCamps are a powerful visible symbol of the merciless power that the Nazis exercised..
to leave them is the same as leaving the Pantheon in Rome, it is a visual reminder of the achievements of the previous empires, and in this instance, the achievement is nothing to keep around. To keep the buildings alive and standing is to keep the Nazis alive..
as a tribute to the ELEVEN MILLION people who perished in those camps, they should be burned and leveled to the ground, and a lovely cemetery put up in its place. I have seen several holocaust memorials that perfectly capture this feeling, and so honestly, I think leaving the camps up is redundent and ineffective.. The american sponsers and the jews who fund these things to keep open want to give the Germans an eternal black eye, but if you ask me, I think those whose grandparents and parents in Germany perpetuated this crime, can't help but look back with a bit of accomplishment, just as today southerners look back to the Confederacy as some kind of glory days..
Slave castles and concentration camps have no purpose once you rid yourself of slavery and genocide. They simply extend the wound, like wearing a band-aid to visibly exaggerate and show off a scar..
In this instance, I feel that the Germans leave these camps up the way a soldier or a fighter BRAGS about his battle scars, and Jews and Poles, Slavs and Czechs, (5 million NONJEWS were also killed, its not just a jewish thing but a European thing) keep picking at the scab..
Lets actually HEAL these wounds. NEVER forget, but please, remember with taste and dignity.
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The Confederate flag is re-appropriated as an atavistic symbol of 'better times'. The thrust towards Arcadia, the idealised past, or the Garden of Eden, a time of innocence, is a common subterfuge in society. I think it's larger than nostalgia, which is a relatively modern construction. The point of the Auschwitz (and other) memorials is precisely the opposite - it's there to remind people that
these places are miserable holes. I've never heard of anyone re-appropriating Auschwitz as a site of glory. What's most common in neo-Nazism, ultra-conservativism and racist far-right movements is precisely the opposite - holocaust denial, or revisionism. The concentration camp memorials stand precisely and exactly in opposition to the analogy you've drawn. You may have made a mis-analogy, but I maintain you're on exceptionally thin ice. You might have a point if you proposed pulling down the Reichstag, or the White House, or Red Square, or the Houses of Parliament [etc].
Do you propose that the remaining bits of the Berlin wall be torn down, or should they stand as a monument to the previously-divided Germany? I sometimes wonder if there's such a radically different feeling about history in the USA precisely because it has very little of it, and a tendency to pull things down rather than leaving them to fester (I'm not, of course, referring to the slums and social housing deprivation, which is an entirely different matter). As you probably know, we all live in castles with moats with islands with more castles on over here. Can't move for bloody history.
You should see the memorial to the war dead in St Petersburg. Genuinely, terrifyingly sublime. Great hills of corpses.